Programming

I am very proud to announce that the the Capital Region Minority Supplier Development Council (CRMSDC) has certified Vidya as a Minority Business Enterprise.
At Vidya, we have been very privileged to deliver high-quality software to a wide array of commercial and government clients using exciting technology while promoting lean principles, agile software development, and diversity in software engineering. The best part about it? It’s been fun! Doing great work and contributing to the community–whether writing on our blog, answering questions on Stack Overflow, contributing to open-source on GitHub, speaking at conferences, and even posting video tutorials on YouTube –have been the most rewarding professional experience of my life.

It’s an honor and a privilege to have helped 2.6 million developers and earned over 25K points on Stack Overflow.
For those who don’t know, Stack Overflow is a Q&A site similar to Quora and Reddit that is essential to life as a software engineer. Most of us turn to it at least once a day to see if anyone else has tackled the same problems, and far more often than not, someone has.

Vidya is proud to have worked on the development of Recreation.gov, a site built for the United States government using leading-edge technologies and practices to make it easier to visit the nation’s most beautiful landmarks and national parks including the Grand Canyon and Mount Whitney.
Often called the “Airbnb for Camping,” Rec.gov (as it is colloquially known) allows users to reserve permits to visit and/or stay overnight at federal lands, waterways, and monuments.

Scala and Go (aka Golang) are two of the fastest growing leading-edge programming languages in the world. In the United States, they are also among the most lucrative. Scala and Go are among a slew of programming languages that innovate in numerous ways to produce faster, more resilient, more secure applications for a multicore, cloud native, mobile world.
The thing is Scala and Go have very different philosophies on what makes engineers most productive and what defines great applications.

Vidya is proud to have teamed with Accenture Federal Services to transition HealthCare.gov from a conventional Java monolith built with Spring into Scala microservices built with Play Framework. One of several factors that motivate software engineers is mission, and there are few missions more fulfilling than helping people access health insurance and ultimately health care as efficiently as possible.
As American readers know, HealthCare.gov faces a lot of exogenous pressure as a proxy in a raging American political and economic maelstrom.

If you are a software engineer or run software projects, code coverage is probably very important to you. It’s intuitive. Of course more tests produce better software! It’s easy to calculate. Tools, automation, and stunning charts to impress the people who pay for the occasional pizza are all readily available.
The problem is code coverage is killing you.
Don’t get me wrong. You deserve credit for your agile commitment to quality and your investment in continuous integration and continuous delivery.

With a new year upon us, I am very proud to announce that the the US Pan Asian American Chamber of Commerce Education Foundation (USPAACC) has certified Vidya as an Asian and minority-owned small business.
At Vidya, we have been very privileged to deliver high-quality software to a wide array of commercial and government clients using exciting technology while promoting lean principles, agile software development, and diversity in software engineering. The best part about it?

Have you found that your code has a lot of bugs even though you’ve invested in maintaining 90% code coverage? Have you also found that your tests break so often that you don’t want to write any more?
I have. With multiple clients.
Part of the problem is code coverage is a misleading indicator of quality. Even worse, you are writing tests that don’t test anything except the implementation details of your code.

Functional programming isn’t exactly a fun topic anywhere outside of technical conferences and The Big Bang Theory. Even software engineers who love code often tune out when they hear terms like monad and referential transparency. But if you are a technical manager or executive, heads up. Functional programming will limit your technical debt so you build better software faster than you imagined and will earn you the Tesla you always wanted.

Vidya is proud to be working with Nina Day, a casting and creative agency based in New York City serving a wide array of clients worldwide. Nina Day finds the best talent–models, actors, musicians, and many others–for ads for Fortune 500 companies, TV and movies, and special campaigns like the United Nations He for She campaign promoting gender equality worldwide.
As you might imagine, a world class casting company needs a talent database, and we have built one for Nina Day.